nick_garou | Come firewalk with me

After returning to St. Claire and doing a check over my node (I keep wanting to call it "territory" like a garou might, which shows how some things have rubbed off on me), I went to check on the nodes in the city. Something told me to take Val's Harley, so I did, and lo and behold I bumped into her and Slug at Harbor Park. I gave her her motorcycle back, fully restored from what it was like when she dropped it off with me earlier. We did a little catching up, and then Slug and I got a little philosophical after Val departed.

Afterwards, I got to thinking about the value of life itself afterwards. Are some lives more valuable than others? And if so, by what metric do we measure one against another? How many human lives is a garou worth? How many garou lives are 100, 10,000, or 10,000,000 acres of pristine forest worth?

One metric might be Prime-based. A garou has more quintessence than a human--although it might differ from garou to garou and human to human, and some humans (such as myself) might have more quintessence than some garou. And that led me into making comparisons among the node I'm protecting, the surrounding woods, and the creatures within it.

It's an uneasy calculus, for sure, looking at the world in these terms.

There are a number of forest fires in Washington State at the moment, and there's a sizeable one a bit to the north-northwest that, when the wind is just so, I can sense in the air. So if I'm to believe this whole merit/worth-is-connected-to-quintessence theory, I should probably go look into making a short trip to help put out a forest fire and to prevent the substantial loss of life from trees and beasts alike.

I invited Benedict to come along and expose him to doing ritual magic and large-scale coincidental workings to save some forestlands. He seemed enthused. So we packed and departed for Ardenvoir, WA, which is the nearest "town" to the fire. I'm going to use "town" in the absolute loosest sense of the word, too. No stoplight. There's a small general store and some rural houses. That's it. The National Forest Service has some roads and trails that go beyond the "town" and deep into the woods. It made hiking in a lot easier than plowing through the forest, but we ended up doing some of that anyway. Wouldn't want to get interrupted by firefighters spotting us on or just off the trail. No vehicles, as that would just draw attention to there being someone in the area. In. Out. Like ninjas. Or more like easily unnoticed "civvies" where they would not be expected.

We found a nice side of a mountain with a good view of the fire (via the insight of a little Entropy and Correspondence) and it became a lesson in ritual magick. The first ritual involved Correspondence and Forces to get a better idea of the fire's path and likely weak and strong points. Then I did a separate, solo ritual with spheres Benedict was not familiar with (Time and Entropy) paired with Forces and Correspondence to get a feel for what the fire's "destiny" looked like. It looks like, if the fire gets to the top of this one particular hill, the embers would catch the winds, drift further abroad, and start a brand new blaze downwind--creating an even larger blaze that would burn another 30,000 acres in addition to the 42,000 it has already consumed. Holding that hill would be the tipping point.

Mission accepted.

Now it is time to return to the sept to see who all wishes to become involved.<